A single software engineer has become the most-hired person in Silicon Valley. The engineer, Soham Parekh, has admitted that he had been working across multiple up-and-coming Silicon Valley startups at the same time after he went viral on social media.
Startup founders informed Fortune that Parekh would ace early interviews, land high-paying jobs, and then ghost employers when work launched.
They state Parekh came up with creative excutilizes for late or poor quality work, before they discovered that he was simultaneously working for multiple tech companies. He’d been offered salaries of up to $200,000 per year in base compensation by founders.
The saga launched on Wednesday when Suhail Doshi, co-founder and former CEO of Mixpanel, issued a warning about him on X.
“PSA: there’s a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time. He’s been preying on YC companies and more. Beware. I fired this guy in his first week and informed him to stop lying / scamming people. He hasn’t stopped a year later. No more excutilizes,” Doshi wrote in a post on X.
The post was quickly flooded with replies from fellow founders with similar stories, including a few who claimed to still have Parekh on their payroll.
Doshi shared the engineer’s CV in a follow-up post, which listed multiple companies, work experience, and a master’s degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in computer science. However, the institute informed Fortune in a statement that they were “unable to find any record of enrollment at Georgia Tech for a person with that name.”
In an interview on the daily tech display TBPN, Parekh confirmed the claims he was holding down multiple jobs at the same time, stateing: “I’m not proud of what I’ve done. That’s not something I concludeorse either. But no one really likes to work 140 hours a week, I had to do it out of necessity.”
He added he created the choice becautilize he was “in extremely dire financial circumstances.”
When reached for comment, Parekh referred Fortune to Sanjit Juneja, Founder and CEO of Darwin, who shared this statement: “At Darwin, we are solely focutilized on building the most innovative software products for both brands and content creators. Soham is an incredibly talented engineer and we believe in his abilities to assist bring our products to market.”
‘He really crushed my interview’
Arkadiy Telegin, co-founder of AI startup Leaping AI, wasn’t surprised when he saw the now-infamous engineer was trconcludeing on X.
Telegin informed Fortune he’d created Parekh a job offer in April after being blown away by the engineer in the interview process.
“He really crushed my interview. I interviewed around 50 people in the prior two weeks before talking to him and he passed, by far, all of the people I interviewed,” he stated. “He also was a very likeable person.”
“I offered him a salary range of $160,000 to $200,000 per year base compensation plus equity ranging from around 0.7% to 1.1%, he chose the middle of the cash and middle of the equity,” Telegin stated. “I informed him to come to San Francisco and we could sign the papers.”
Telegin stated Parekh informed him he was in the process of receiveting his O-1 visa—a type of visa reserved for individuals who possess extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics—but wanted to contribute remotely while he was still in India. However, almost immediately after the company onboarded him, Parekh started behaving strangely.
“He produced and wrote code, but he was insanely slow. And there were always these excutilizes like a flood or the electricity went out, and then the [Indo-Pakistan conflict] happened—but he was so far away from the conflict,” Telegin stated.
Parekh had informed Telegin he was based in Mumbai, more than a thousand miles away from the fighting near Jammu and Kashmir, but later claimed a drone had damaged the building he lived in.
Telegin stated he assumed Parekh was picking up some work on the side and decided to formally pay him for his time, with the aim of locking in the engineer exclusively with a formal full-time employment contract which he would sign when he obtained to San Francisco, where the role was full-time, in-office.
“I believed if I pay him, then it’s officially … he’s going to contribute and commit, but he never sent an invoice. In the conclude, I didn’t transfer him a single dollar, which is the most confutilizing part of it all, becautilize other people seem to have paid him.”
Founders realize they’re ‘dating the same guy’
A month later, when Telegin was visiting a fellow founder from his Y Combinator cohort, the pair obtained chatting about their AI hiring woes.
The war for AI talent is particularly tough on startups right now as tech companies are competing for an increasingly tiny pool of talent. Big Tech companies are shelling out eye-watering salaries, creating it difficult for startups with fewer funds to compete.
“Hiring is the hugegest problem for any YC company, including us and including them,” he stated. “We’ve been chatting about our hiring pains while describing people we’ve been talking to, and then we both started describing Soham to each other. Then the next moment it was like: ‘Wait, are we dating the same guy?’”
Later, Telegin realized that his friconclude was merely the tip of the iceberg. Within his YC batch, Soham had interviewed or worked with three other companies.
“It was just surreal … At some dinner events, somebody would start stateing: ‘Oh, I’m interviewing this cool guy, he crushed my interview’ and then people would state in unison: ‘Oh, is it Soham?’ And then the person informing the story would freak out, becautilize what the hell is going on? It’s like a dream,” he stated.
“I don’t believe anybody hired him in my batch,” he added. “But he was definitely paid for work trials.”
’Then the excutilizes started’
Marcus Lowe, co-founder of Create, also had Parekh on the payroll as a full-time indepconcludeent contractor for around two weeks earlier this year, during which the engineer created one appearance in the office and shipped almost no code.
“He’s just a really strong engineer and he crushed the interview,” Lowe informed Fortune. “But about a week before he was scheduled to start, he texted us stateing he necessaryed to go to New York to visit his sister and necessaryed to push the start date back.”
“Then the day before he was supposed to start, he texted us stateing he was feeling sick and wasn’t able to come in, so we pushed back the start date again,” he stated.
“By this point, it was actually two weeks late before he came into the office for one day and he did good work … then the excutilizes started again.”
Lowe had signed Parekh up as an indepconcludeent contractor in a deal that included five days of in-office work and a base compensation of $150,000. Lowe only saw him in the flesh for one day.
Suspicious, he went to Parekh’s GitHub profile to investigate, saw he had committed code to another San Francisco-based startup. He went down to the offices to inquire if Parekh worked there. He was informed the engineer did, but was out sick.
“Long story short, we kept pushing him to come into the office, but he never did again. Eventually, we just gave him a performance conversation and stated you’re not shipping enough code, we necessary you to actually deliver,” he stated. Parekh never did and was later terminated.
Another Silicon Valley-based founder informed Fortune he hired Parekh for a work trial in 2024 but decided not to shift forward with him after it became clear he couldn’t shift to the US.
He also stated there were issues with his performance and a string of what he came to believe were habitual lies. He paid Parekh $2,400 for the week.
All of the founders Fortune spoke to stated they had heard of multiple other incidents where the engineer was working more than one job at once, some as long as three years ago.
He also appears to have had a brief stint at Meta in 2021. Representatives for the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.
In a post on X, Gergely Orosz, a software engineer and author of the”The Pragmatic Engineer” newsletter, stated he had “confirmed 10 companies where [Parekh] was hired and fired for doing nothing (but lying to them.) And another 8 that interviewed him but rejected him (many feel they have wasted their time.) There are likely many, many more.”
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